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hi welcome to CNET offices in San Francisco I'm Connie Guillermo editor-in-chief of CNET news and I'm here today to introduce a very special guest speaker Alex garland is known to many of you for his sci-fi work books scripts directing projects and we're going to talk to him about those projects and something coming up in the next month so please join me in welcoming Alex garland to CNN so thanks I'm a print reporter so doing video is always a new thing for me but I hope that we make this an engaging and interesting QA for all of you thank you Alex for joining us I'm gonna get up because the cameraman said move over a bit see we're tweaking so it'll be like a reality TV moment yeah you happy all right sorry that's all right all right so I have a little brief intro of Alex that I want to read off and then we'll get right into questions we're gonna be talking here for about 45 minutes and thank you for everyone who sent me your questions there are about 50 cards that I could have brought but we're gonna try to keep it to 45 minutes here so as I say Alex garland is a writer and director some of you might have read his books the beach anybody add it to your reading list just don't don't do that none of you read it and it's fine it was like 25 years ago it's fine so add it to your reading list it's a cult classic some of you may have seen the movies that he wrote the screenplay for 28 days later sunshine never let me go dread and for the past few years he's also started directing so anybody here has seen ex machina for ex machina he also earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay later this month a new film he's directed and written the screenplay for annihilation is coming out I was lucky enough to see it earlier this week this is going to be a spoiler free discussion as much as we can make it but I hope that you get a good sense of that movie I recommend everyone go see it because the one thought that I had after I saw it was thought-provoking in a way where you walk outside and you kind of walk into the wall cuz you're still thinking about what you've just seen okay here's my first question for you this is very unscientific but I looked up on Wikipedia and they internet the descriptions of all the projects that you've worked on and here are some of the words and phrases people have used subtly intelligent stylish cerebral dystopian surreal strange and interesting a sci-fi fantasy a human drama quietly disturbing post-apocalyptic car story a sci-fi action film a poignant coming-of-age love story with undertones of sadness and horror running zombies in daylight in London so fair to say you've spent most of the past two decades in sci-fi but I read that you were a history major and maybe sort of an indifferent student wow this is a good example of how reliable Wikipedia is probably my mum wrote most of those comments I suspect and I studied history of art ah art I did Manchester University between I don't know age of 19 and 22 but ya know I did I was there I studied history of art and was barely present and I'm not sure it led to anything but I sort of enjoyed it kind of well I think it's led to someplace that I want to talk to you about the big discussion in Techland this day these days is about people getting into science and technology engineering math stem and I read and maybe I'm wrong that you got into science in your 20s on your own and sort of discovered it which is unusual way for people to get into the topic that is true when I was at school I I struggled actually at school and I'm 47 I think probably education is a lot more kind of relaxed now in some respects or I hope it is we got streamed into like slow groups and fast groups and stuff like that and some of the things certainly things like mathematics in fact pretty much everything I was in the slow group and when it came to science with physics and biology and chemistry I wasn't able to take any of them as exams because my my performance wasn't up to it so I had to take this thing called environmental science which is what they gave to people who couldn't do the real science and and I think I just I think I just figured that it was all beyond me and in many respects it is all beyond me except as a layperson I can be interested in it and in my twenties I I began to hear things that related to science such as it would be like a little detail that the faster you go the slower time passes and that kind of thing or sort of puzzled me it didn't fit with any sense of time that I had and so I started reading but really as an uneducated layperson and that that never really stopped I'm now 47 and I've been trying to get my head around collapse of you know wavefunction or whatever as best I can and which isn't very much but but I understand why it's interesting so yeah that's true and and then I I tried to put it in the narratives as much as possible because there is something strange about the well the way the world is functioning at the moment where there's a massive disconnect that there are disconnects everywhere almost everywhere you look between people who have and don't have or know or don't know and one of the areas is science and it's a it's an increasingly rarefied group and the the knowledge gap is scary and I don't think helpful so I guess I try and include it in the narratives I write also I would I would say you've had a career in stem just based on the work and what you have written I've had a career in stem a science tech engineering math you've got a stem background oh it's them that's an Americanism and it's lost on me sorry but but I think it's probably good so thanks it was a compliment in case you weren't sure having seen a lot of your work and read some of the screenplays actually that are online probably you don't know that but the future is a very strange kind of unsettling place in your creative world and I'm curious I know that you're a fan of B movies and you call them paranoid sci-fi films that you watched in the 70s like Soylent Green Logan's Run Planet of the Apes West world how that informed your take on sci-fi in your work oh well I work in genre I I write thrillers and sci-fi movies and and then to some extent try to subvert them but actually some of those older films were in themselves very subversive they're their typical - usually their anti-authoritarian in some kind of way and suspicious and take all kinds of risks and yeah that that's the stuff I grew up on and I'm of course it's found its way into to what I do yeah ask - sci-fi you've said that you like the genre because and this is a quote allows for really really big subject matter without having to be embarrassed about it that's right when I first started I always felt like I had to smuggle ideas in to the stories so first movie I ever wrote was 28 days later which is a zombie flick and there were ideas into it but but they were they were kind of buried or hidden for the most part and I realized increasingly that in science fiction you have permission you have permission for big ideas and actually most sci-fi tends to work as analogy or metaphor in some kind of way and so I increasingly gravitated towards it it just you didn't hurt yeah like you said in the question you didn't have to feel embarrassed about the idea in fact it's almost encouraged what about comedy would you ever do one I just tried to write one so yeah it's kids movie I got two children and I just wrote two scripts back-to-back actually one of them is a kind of tech thriller which is set here actually in San Francisco I'm about to spend coming back in a few weeks to kind of look around and try and find locations and that kind of thing hopefully you know all things being equal we'll shoot later in the year so that's great but I've got two children and they've never seen anything I've worked on it's always too violent or druggie or whatever and so I thought I will try before my daughter gets too old to do one kids movie she's 10 if I can get it done within the next two years she'll be interested okay what about VR ever thought of doing a movie in viewer I am a big video game or I love video games and so I'm I'm aware of VR I've got the PlayStation VR headset and a friend of mine has got oculus rift he got it set up and running because he's super smart and this was maybe before it was like commercially available they had like a development kit for it or something there and I think it's amazing I think it's application probably this is the kind of audience that would correct me it's application seems more suited to video games than to filmed narrative and it's it's not it's not because of anything other than norcia actually in a videogame you're controlling the camera and so you don't get the seasick thing where the boat moves in a direction you're not expecting and you start to feel terrible what I have found in in anything that looked like a cutscene where the camera moves in a certain kind of way it's difficult it you get a you get a visceral response you get an inner-ear type problem a nossa type problem and a kind of stomach type problem you sort of lurching feeling I I don't know how to direct the gaze in that kind of VR and I don't which you do in film easily with lighting and focus and stuff like that I'm not sure how you do that in VR but mainly I'm not sure how you move the camera without making people want to throw up or take the helmet off but video games awesome so I guess we'll have to wait and see somebody come up with oh yeah all I'm saying is I don't know how to do it but some of them maybe your kids yeah I want to ask you about ex machina and so sorry if we discuss spoilers for people who didn't see it but too bad it came out in 2015 you said you felt huge affection for Ava and it's her story that you were writing and her journey were most concerned with telling and the character of Caleb Smith is meant to be ask the audience watching and learning it as he learns what's going on and so I was curious about why was that the story wanted to tell why was she the focal point for you because the film had two separate sets of concerns I mean one of it was sentient and artificial intelligence and human intelligence and that's very kind of apparent but there was another set of interests in it as well and it were I think loosely speaking you'd say attached to gender initially so you you have a machine that looks female and how is the gender attributed is it something that is contained in a physical form it conferred upon the machine by other people why would the word it feel inappropriate to the machine and which would imply conferred and or is it is it simply an appearance and so initially there's a gender discussion but then it becomes something else as well which was literally just about objectification which is that this young kid caleb is is set a task does this machine have an interior life it's it's very very straightforward question he is asked the question and the audience is asked the question at the same time so he in that respect as a surrogate for the audience and at a certain point the machine stops looking like a machine when the Machine first appears it is very clearly overtly a machine but the Machine aspect is increasingly hidden and as the Machine aspect is hidden the question stops being asked so now that might not be true for every audience member but effectively there is a twist at the end which is that the machine does have an interior life now that would not be a twist if you had continued to expect that the machine had an interior life so why was it in there because it was the preoccupation of the film any plans to continue the story no okay there was a lot of just there was and is a lot of discussion around it artificial intelligence and you've said that writing ex machina has not made you an expert on it but you wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times in 2015 basically defending AI and calling out people like Stephen Hawking's and Elon Musk were afraid of it and you said that it's not the machine component of AI that scares you but the humans can you tell us a little bit about your thinking there yeah I mean that that's a reductive argument but I think it's broadly speaking correct I think you can make a good analogy with nuclear power and nuclear power is clearly powerful and therefore potentially dangerous but it becomes about application of it I think there is another thing I felt as well which is the eye I don't like Luddite thinking III understand that technology is potentially dangerous but I also think it's potentially beneficial and you just have to take a measured approach to it I live in Britain and in Britain we have a National Health Service which is run by humans and it seems to me to be perfectly plausible that the state-run National Health Service would be better run by an AI that that doesn't seem dangerous to me that seems potentially beneficial all sorts of political decisions and how you attribute resources might simply be better done by an AI so I'm a mile armed by that no I think it's a possibility there's other areas in which AI could potentially be very dangerous so it's not to take a benign or paranoid view it's just to take a measured view how much AI have you adopted in your personal life do you have a smart speaker do you talk to your phone no I don't I'm I'm sort of slightly too old maybe but my son does you know I've noticed when he sends a text message he doesn't type it in he talks it I'm sort of used to the disconnect in some respect I I saw it with my parents when they couldn't use a remote control on a television and it's it's sort of in the nature of what happens but even though I don't use those things particularly I'm aware of them to the extent I can be and I don't feel alarmed by them let's switch and talk about annihilation um but before I dive into that you have told others that you came to the project because Scott Rudin the producer wanted you to read the book but you had gone to him to talk about another project what was the other project oh it was more just I've always got a project kind of that I'm mulling over and and it was it event essentially got folded into annihilation but ya know Scott came to me with the book we just worked together on ex machina he said read it and I was struck actually by the books originality actually it just wasn't like other stories that I'd read one of the things that happens with stories is that we repeat them where we say the same story again and again and again and we we change details or elements but essentially it's the same story and and this felt outside of that and for that reason alone I was very attracted to it and it also had a very strong atmosphere very unusual atmosphere and so I felt I did want to work on it whilst not being entirely sure how to work on it and and the the preoccupations of the other project just folded into the new one annihilation you've described as truly alien and that was what you were going for as well maybe I'm wrong maybe the internet got it wrong again no but what does that mean truly alien oh it was that when we when we deal with aliens we we often make them like us in some way maybe they want to eat us or maybe they want our water our resources or they want to teach us about galactic federations or whatever it happens to be but these are all sort of human concerns and and it seems like a legitimate thing to say that an alien might not be like us in any way at all and we are motivated by things and we have agendas and an alien might not have an agenda or might not be motivated and so it was it was an attempt to create an alien alien and you talked about the journey that you're taking us on as suburbia to psyckadeli a-- psyckadeli uh is that right where's the san francisco you should know well that's the way you described it not me and I I'm curious about that as well what does that means how does that play out in the movie in a spoiler-free way as you want to describe in a literal way the story starts in suburbia and ends in psychedelia and in it was a sort of shorthand on the film it's the way we used to talk about it to each other and it had a purpose to it as well because if you if what you want to do is is end in a place that is strange that is truly strange the means by which you get there become very important and if you start something strange so not in suburbia which let's take suburbia is as representing not strange although of course it is a reach sure what you find is that strangeness has a diminishing return we we're sort of proximity based creatures and we get acclimatized to a state quite quickly and so by the end of the film what was strange is no longer strange it's just the landscape in which you exist and so it felt like it needed to be a progression from something I'm thinking about it because I just saw the movie and that obviously makes a lot of sense having the director explained to the screenplay and the book part ways that's been a topic of a lot of discussion and as someone who's written screenplays that are very faithful to the original material like never let me go and or maybe semi faithful like dread you have said that annihilation was a chance to do a free-for-all and why is that what about the material may be it may be free form rather than free-for-all what what I felt when I was writing the book when I was reading the book excuse me that's a as Freudian as it gets was that reading it was a dreamlike experience and I wasn't sure saying effectively in an adaptation like never let me go I could kind of cut and paste narrative right and I couldn't do that in annihilation I it was the experience of reading the book that felt most relevant so I did something slightly odd with the permission of the writer that's what I thought I had at any rate I hope I did which was to do a it was an adaptation which was a memory of the book so instead of going back and rereading it and underlining passages I did an adaptation from my experience of having read it without going back to the book and what that means is that sometimes the film correlates very closely and sometimes it doesn't so it really as a function of memory and I thought that that was a way to be faithful to the thing that I experienced most strongly what which was it's dreamlike nature the film focuses on an all-women team so it passes the Bechdel test which says that you have to have at least two women it who talk to each other and about something besides a man there's a very loud debate going on today about diversity in the role of women in a variety of industries Tech Hollywood etc so I want to applaud you for saying over and over again it doesn't make a difference to you that the story is about women scientists it's just that it's about scientists who happen to be women does it surprise you that people say to you oh but this is this is women this is a no they're pushing new ground nobody said that to me and and also it was it was an adaptation of the book and that is the case in the book I I don't want to sort of take credit for what or Jeff did really but it is true that it didn't interest me I thought that this was to some extent a reaction to ex machina I thought the absence of the argument was the thing that was interesting if that makes sense it yeah in a way I don't want to say more than that it was the absence of the argument I found interesting I want to applaud you for that as well as a woman in tech because we're get tired of hearing about great CEOs or leaders and then having them being qualified as great women CEOs or great women leaders what about the behind the camera Oh an i elation looks like a pretty mixed crew but the director editor cinematographer music those are all men true but the head of stunts and actually all sorts of departments were not I mean look but but you know what I'm not gonna you is is the film industry dominated by men yep statement of fact it is alright I understand that you did a lot of research for annihilation and talk to geneticists about evolution mutation and I I want to understand what's the most important takeaway you want the people who watch it to have when it comes to the science in anihilation not much it's it's it's it's not really science it has an agenda which is really about self-destruction I would say it clues in the name yeah it's it's more sort of metaphysical than science I'd say there is science in there to kind of ground it there was a principle this might sound strange but if you think of a dream if I'm saying that what this film is dreamlike dreams feel grounded in some strange kind of way so now this is a dream and to my right there's a grand piano and a couple of moments later it's a polar bear and you don't within the dream say why is the grand piano now a polar bear it's actually part of the dream logic and it's part of the dream you're having and it all makes sense and so it felt important that the film had that strange sense of grounding in it but it's also like not free for all but free form it has that quality as well so it was it was a sort of mixture of the two I wouldn't really take the science to explicitly in some respects although it's that did you have fun making it no it was a nightmare it was a truly unpleasant film to work on but well it's just a statement of fact but I'm very proud of the film and I'm proud it was made by collective I work in a collective I work some of the people I've worked with them for 20 years and we worked flat out hard on this and it was a good group of people not easy not fun but we ended up with something we collectively felt proud of it's going to be distributed in a very unusual way we'll be able to see it here in the US in China Canada and then Netflix has the international distribution rights I think everyone knows how you feel about that you designed a movie for the large screen I'm curious though what you think about streaming services as a way to distribute movies and what the potential you see there yeah it's an entirely separate issue and what I feel is that broadly it's a good thing if I ask myself what is the best bit of filmed drama I saw last year it's Handmaid's Tale and I saw that on a streaming service I think some of the most sophisticated adult content adult meaning morally complex rather than pornographic was on streaming services and on the small screen in general I'd say on television television or streaming so so I think it's good and it disseminates stuff very widely and it is more comfortable with complex matter I would say then the big screen is the big screen is has a problem which is its opening weekend and the film's cost a lot of money and if they don't make they don't generate a lot of money in the first weekend people lose their jobs people don't work again it's sort of serious and difficult streaming services are different it's it's a more passive relationship it's you know ten bucks a month or whatever it is that someone's paying to participate in it and it allows for more creative freedom so I think that's a good thing well you can also pass take it back and go what right and watch it over and over again and that to do you binge watch you mean just like watch a ton of stuff in a day yeah yeah aside from Handmaid's Tale what have you been watched last man on earth I think that's it okay it probably isn't there's probably other stuff I can't think well there must be some kids stuff there you get sucked into no I know I can walk out the room oh you know what I like adventure time i watch that with the kids um what movie would you like to see may that you would never make yourself I don't know that's like what's your favorite color um what's your favorite color I don't have a favorite color and if I really had a movie I wanted to try to make I would try to make it that's that's the plus of my job you know yeah nothing on that okay sorry last year you signed a deal to develop some TV projects for X F 4 FX excuse me and one of the questions that was written in was having written dread and had been made some comments about perhaps it's not the the best take on dread would you consider doing no it was the best take it was well no I mean I'm being glib I was very happy with dread I was really pleased to that film it bombed in the box office but the film itself other was pretty cool okay would you consider revisiting dread definitely not no but that that's just because I I I don't like working in franchises I don't want to work in sequels just cuz life is short and I'd rather try something different okay in 2005 you wrote a script for a film adaptation of the popular video game Halo it was never made into a film so what was your vision for halo can you tell us I was a long time ago I basically oh I know exactly what I did I went online and somebody had done a transcript of the entire video game every bit of dialogue and every cutscene and I followed it very closely that's what I did and I wanted to do a faithful adaptation of hallo I actually really dug hallo some of my favorite video game experiences were working through I don't know maybe no one in remember say hello but it was it had its hardest setting was legendary and it was hard and it was a split screen because I don't know I'm not sure we had the ability to hook up you know play online and me and my brother would get stoned and play a low and gradually claw our way through the legendary level and I loved it so I wanted to try and honor that but then they didn't make it into a film too avant-garde sort of stone or avant-garde yeah you've also co-written a bunch of other video game things in slave Odyssey to the west you worked as a story supervisor on the game Devil May Cry why do you like video games what's the appeal of writing for them I grew up with video games 47 there was a kid my like my best friend actually lived a couple of streets over his mum and dad went to America came back with pong you know like a tennis game and I just couldn't believe it I I thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen started playing games never stopped grew up with him like I said space invaders pac-man then Nintendo blew the world open and Sega followed and I just kept going and I thought it was fantastic and I never and and it's been really kind of a beautiful thing to see how video games have exploded and become so sophisticated if there's any gamers here you'll know probably the Last of Us which is the most amazingly sophisticated narrative with complex morals you know of the sort I said streaming services is doing so well well there it is happening in video game and I enjoyed working on it I'm it's probably not something I'm too well-suited to in some respects I'd love to do it again but really I like playing them I like experiencing them and playing them I think that I think they're amazing I think their potential is spectacular do you let your kids play oh yeah for sure I mean me and my son play destiny in the way that me and my brother used to play Halo we don't get stoned because he's 14 but I mean we we enjoy it if you could be a video game character who would that be this was a question from my office yeah it's fair enough all right there's a game called tempest which is an old arcade game and I would be the weird spider thing going along the top shooting at the aliens I want to ask you just about Tech in your life are you addicted to a piece of tech no I'm kind of separate from it I've never been on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or any of that stuff my kids do it I I come to all these things late and I actually think I need to get up to speed with it more it's it's not a judgement but there is stuff about it that scares me I don't like public crucifixions at all and I'm really sick of hearing about it on the media I if I if I was on Twitter I'd be dead you know I'd be crucified I'd be hung drawn and quartered because glancing thoughts crossed my mind and I haven't thought all of them through and I make mistakes and I changed my mind the next day and I find I find the rush to judgment kind of sickening actually and and also banal you know kind of banal and boring I'm truly truly tired of it and I don't want to be part of it I feel anxious about my children being part of it but what am I gonna do is there's the way of the world okay well that was not a you know squishy answer on social there self-driving cars good or bad so it depends if they crash and kill someone I mean let's broadly say good as long as nobody gets hurt okay fair enough would you go for a ride in one yeah sure what technology do you wish were invented specifically for you time travel anti-aging longevity new lungs that kind of stuff what technology do you wish were never invented aside from social hmm nothing nothing I mean if I really thought about it maybe something but like I said I'm not Luddite I don't know if that is saying that means anything to people Luddites being the people that smashed up the looms during the industrial revolution and were anti technology and I'm not anti-technology I'm scared of its applications but but the technology itself I think is neutral usually I think um what do you think of Silicon Valley you visited here a couple of times as you said you're about to hopefully set a movie here TV series yeah um I think it's intriguing I think it's it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of its own sort in some respects and it's it's clearly on a kind of expansion scale it scares me because I'm left-wing and old-fashioned in some respects and what I see is very very powerful corporations without much oversight government correctly has checks and balances built into it and I don't see the checks and balances here I see I see capitalism and capitalism is dangerous capitalism is more dangerous than tech I believe in regulation and so so it scares me I don't trust it it's unelected I don't believe that purchasing a product is equivalent to election it's it's a it is a different thing you can you can unelect someone later you can't unelect the corporation so i feel weary so don't own a lot of stocks in tax then I don't own any stocks in anything as far as I'm aware but but that's that in itself isn't a judgment it's just laziness I'd like to make money out of it if I could that would be cool but it's it's more no I I'm talking about broader step back things if you guys are tech people you guys are powerful you know with power comes responsibility take it seriously that's all aside from social media is there something that stands out for you that you think Tech has done particularly wrong it's been it quite easy you're saying social medias done it wrong it's not the social media it's the way it's used it's it's people being kind of crude acting like a mob that that's not the media that is the behavior of the people within the media it's people not being forgiving in the way that we are when the person is standing in front of us have tech companies done stuff wrong yeah of course I'm sure they have every corporation every person has that's maybe the point I'm not I'm not talking about it in those terms I'm saying power power is dangerous tech companies are powerful therefore they need some kind of regulation that's all I just circling back because we're gonna wrap it up here in a few minutes but annihilation it's definitely a thought-provoking movie and people are gonna have expectations having seen ex machina what's the best thing that you want people to say after they walk out what do you want them what would you consider a high praise I'd be grateful if they went in the first place if they walked out feeling that it was a kind of visceral thought-provoking experience that would be ideal I would I would say it's probably a film to see with an open mind and and hopefully a film that is that stays with people to some extent that's what one always hopes I think it has a definite mood and I wonder did you listen to any particular music to get you there because the music is kind of interesting when I was watching the preview people were kind of following along with your soundtrack and I just wondered what the inspiration was when you sat down to imagine what that would be well I know it's hard for you guys you haven't seen the movie sorry well I work I think as I've said in a collective I'm not controlling those things I'm not interested in pyramid structures and the people responsible for the music in a way the people who should ask I thought the music was beautiful and powerful but I didn't write it and it was written by these two guys Jeff Barrow and Ben Salisbury and Jeff's in a band called Porter said he's not really from a film background is from a like a rock background I guess you'd say and Ben's an old mate of his and they make beautiful music together and I just dug what what they were you know the way they responded to the work that everyone else was doing and that was their contribution it is very visually stunning the music has an effect and just a spoiler alert water plays a big role in it and you used a lot of visuals around water so go to the restroom before you see that movie just I guess my last question is you've been talking about these movies and your work is sci-fi we're all fans video games huge crowd here but you get asked a lot about how you think and how you process sci-fi and how you come to make these films but what questions has nobody ever asked you that you'd like to answer then you'd like to talk oh my gosh these questions you ask um so now my job is to think of a question that no one's ever asked me that I'd love to asked its I'm gonna ask it to you what have you always wanted to be asked how do you come up with such great questions okay and that's the sort of dropped the mic moment and then that's the end of this right we can certainly ended here good thank you very much Alex garland for joining us here at CNN you know start from the beginning what do you think I do when you're away you think I'm out in the garden pining your husband's here let me see him he was extremely ill you have to tell me why why is what he was doing it was his decision to go in the shimmer we've sent in drones and teams of people but nothing comes back but something has you're a biologist who served in the military if I knew what happened I did save his life the boundary is getting bigger it's expanding we're talking city-states all you need to know what's inside it's beautiful check this out like they're stuck in a continuous rotation are they understand they're no sharks have teeth like that not possible you can't cross great different spaces - well soldiers on the last expedition they went crazy or something in here kill them something's come through the fence there were the fence we have to go back I can't go back we can camp here tonight it's destroying everything it's not to scream it's making something new